FLORDEMAYO – Wise Woman of the Earth
By Donna Strong
From an interview that was originally posted in “AWARENESS” Magazine
A wise woman of the earth, Flordemayo has been a Curandera Espiritu, a healer of divine spirit, her entire life. And through her keen vision she is able to sense other realms of light, sound and color. As a seer, she is able to see the effects of existing imbalances on the physical, emotional and spiritual levels within a person’s energy system.
Flordemayo is a founding member and President of the Institute of Natural and Traditional Knowledge, based in Estancia, New Mexico. She has been widely recognized for her healing ability and wisdom, including being the recipient of the Martin de la Cruz Award for Alternative Healing. This prestigious honor is given by the International Congress of Traditional Medicine. Working with respected spiritual leader, Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez Oxlaj, who is head of the Quiche Maya Council of Elders, Flordemayo has been recognized as a ‘Priestess’ by the Maya.
Flordemayo was born and grew up in the big highlands of Central America in a family of traditional healers. She now travels around the globe to share her healing abilities and to foster more spiritual understanding among people. Since 2004, Flordemayo has been a founding member of the Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, a group of traditional female elders drawn from around the world, whose work it is to travel and unite people through a circle of prayer.
A frequent contributor at international conferences such as the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Bioneers, we are most honored to highlight the visionary work of Flordemayo, in our July/August Indigeous Peoples Issue.
Awareness: In the West we often define health as the absence of symptoms, but as a Curandera Espiritu, you may have a different perspective on the process of healing and what health is.
Flordemayo: To my observation, when we look for healing and are doing everything we can to heal, we come to a place of surrender. When we surrender, we open ourselves to receive. Not only do we receive the wisdom we are to receive, but then we also open our hearts and our minds and it is at this point that someone like myself who does healings becomes a conduit, an intermediary who will bring the person looking for healing into a magical dance between themselves and their Beloved. So in actuality what I see is a magical dance. I don’t see it any other way. Healings don’t happen unless we surrender.
Awareness: From what I have read, you basically see light in and around a person.
Flordemayo: I see light with everything. Everything is alive. When it is alive, it is full of light. I see light like the Aurora Borealis, you know how it moves, kind of like that. I also hear my Beloved speaking to me. So then I will let the person know what it is that I am seeing and what I am being told. I ask for permission to look into their sacred space. When I ask for permission, I close my eyes and listen to their name. In listening to their voice, I listen to the vibration and it is the vibration that opens the picture for me. I close my eyes and with my spirit eye, I see a combination of a dance of color and light in and around the body, and this is how I do the healings.
Awareness: You have said there is quality of trust that needs to emerge…
Flordemayo: Well, you see the trust also comes when we surrender. We can’t be in fear or doubt. When I meet people for the first time, I don’t know anything about them and they don’t know much about me, so when I start talking to them and I say, ‘I see this and this and that going on in your body, and you’ve been doing this and it hasn’t helped you out. As I’m starting the dialogue with the person, I also see the energies.
When I pray I ask for help from the Beloved with this healing, because I am not the healer. It is between the person and his or her Beloved. So as soon as the person starts receiving through this dialogue, I start witnessing the change. I talk to them, “Look, now this is beginning to move, I see this other light and other color coming in, and I see the healing starting.” Some healings are instantaneous and some are not.
Awareness: You were acknowledged at a very young age as a healer. Can you tell us a bit about how that happened?
Flordemayo: The recognition came from my family, my mother, brothers and sisters, while I was a baby. I was born seeing, and I was not the only child born like this in our family. In my particular case I saw a lot of things. My mother was a midwife.
When I was four, my mother decided that it would be good for me to come with her while delivering babies. I never saw the baby being delivered. She would give me the baby after the umbilical was cut and the baby was cleaned and wrapped in a little blanket.
I would kind of innocently just look at the baby and I would see how the light looked, things in the past and in future, in the presence of the child. I would see little bits of information, but it was enough to delight the mother and father, and my mother thought it was a good way for me to continue my growth. It was beautiful!
Awareness: How few babies born are seen and recognized such as this! So you worked with your mother probably for quite a long time…
Flordemayo: My mother was my teacher throughout my life until she passed away when I was seventeen. I was with her when she took her last breath, and was able to help guide and prepare her in surrendering her physical body. By the age of seventeen, when you come from Central America, you are raised in such a reality of life, so I felt like I was all grown up having seen so much – birth and death. You know, you are never ready for your mom to die. Absolutely never. I didn’t have a dad, and was the youngest in the family, so I got married right after my mother died.
I wanted to have a teacher because I was always seeing and experiencing with dreams, and you have a need to communicate with a physical person who understands you, who would be able to sit there and dialogue. I really missed that as I was getting older. I prayed and prayed and prayed to my Beloved. It wasn’t until my late forties when my teacher came. So there was a long period of loneliness waiting for a teacher. When he came, my interest at the time was my people and their way of life. I wanted to hear the language and prayer in the Mayan language. That is how I came to meet him.
Awareness: How courageous that you kept going for what must have felt like such a long time – almost two decades.
Flordemayo: I was not ready to embark on this journey until then. Earlier I had to take care of little children, the house and the husband. But I met my teacher in a period of time in my life when my children were all grown up and I could give my teacher one hundred percent of my time.
Awareness: I had also wanted to ask, what is it that you would offer women about being more in alignment with rhythms of nature?
Flordemayo: I am honored to say that my mother taught me so much – this is what her life was, working with women. My mother used a few herbs in her practice that are really, really good for the woman’s body.
One of the things my mother always talked about was how we as modern women had forgotten how to honor and feed the earth. In doing so, she would always, when she could, squat on the earth and allow her menstrual to flow on the earth. Because this was food for the earth and we had the capacity to do that.
When I was a child, all of the placenta was buried in the earth. But we don’t do that anymore. I had the privilege of doing this with my grandchildren, but not my children, because I was in a big city when I had my children. As women, we have to be aware of the need to feed the earth and how we are going to do this. We have to feed the earth the nourishment she needs.
Awareness: Is there anything you would suggest to women living in urban areas to stay more attuned to the cycles and rhythms of Mother Earth?
Flordemayo: When you go outside you bless the ground. Even women in urban areas can collect their blood and give it to the Earth. Let that be a silent dialogue with the Earth. If there is a will, we just have to find a way of doing it. In the old days women would use a sponge or a rag; they would wash it, take that water and put it in a very sacred place, so it is not anything we cannot do.
to read the rest of the interview, go to: http://www.spiritofmaat.com/oct11/flordemayo.html
